The optimists’ guide to how ‘Neanderthals’ can cope with AI entering our workplaces
Sunday, 7 December 2025
Rob Stock witnesses accountants and tax professionals enter a ballroom agonising over whether AI is going to decimate their ranks, and leaves feeling somewhat heartened.
So terrorised are tax professionals by the threat of AI, hundreds stayed on at the end of a two-day tax conference in Auckland late last month to hear about the “threats and opportunities” artificial intelligence posed to their lives.
The spectre of AI taking jobs is haunting the nightmares of many knowledge workers.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows 71% of people are concerned AI will put too many people out of work permanently, leading potentially to societal instability and conflict, and a recent global report claimed 40% of 18 to 24-year-olds were suffering AI-induced anxiety.
Accountants at the Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand conference at the Cordis hotel were first treated to the threat, embodied by the language choices of PWC’s Kayur Patel, who presented a world spilt between clever technology-adopters and “Neanderthals”.
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“I live in a world where the idea that I would walk up to the office, open up my laptop, open up Word, and write some text into Word like a Neanderthal, kind of gives me an allergic reaction,” Patel said.
In popular culture, Neanderthal is often used to describe people about to be replaced by a more highly evolved form of life, though science has upended that idea, with Neanderthals now seen as having been an advanced and adaptive people who didn’t die out, but interbred with “modern humans” to contribute to the development of the people we are now.
Patel even had a timeline for Neanderthals.
“I'm not saying we're all in that world now, but you're all going to be in that world sometime within the next 12 to 18 months. Of that I'm very sure,” he said.
“In the next 12 to 18 months, all knowledge work will be done in conjunction with these tools.”
Non-Neandethals need not worry, at least in the short term.
“For those of us that get onto this journey now, we're going have some amazing margin gains,” he said. “But for those of us that don't, we'll eventually turn up to a tank war with muskets and we'll be in a bit of strife.”
Seasoned tax adviser Geof Nightingale has seen a few more waves of technology hyping than the much younger Patel, and he’s more optimistic about people’s ability to adapt.
“Is this technology wave different? Well, in some ways it's not, in my view. It's just another wave of technology for our profession, and since I've been in it, we've been through a range of technology adoptions, and we've proven remarkably adaptive and remarkably resilient as a profession,” he said.
He started work when accountants didn’t have computers.
“We had adding machines and eight column ledgers. Then we got a computer on our desks, and that was pretty exciting,” he said.
“Then sometime around the mid-90s we got access to internet and email. None of that changed us too much really. It speeds things up. It made us more insightful. We could bring better insights to our clients. It made us easier to deal with.”
It did mean that some of the “secret knowledge” accountants and tax advisers had was suddenly available for free on the internet.
“So as advisers we had to move up the value chain to stay relevant,” he said, and they did it. They adapted.
“We brought in each of those waves of change. There was always speculation, if you go back to the old media, that accounting was a sunset industry, and would be fully automated. There will be no jobs. Don't send your kids off to do commerce. But that didn't happen. There are more accounting jobs now than ever,” he said.
Then in late 2022, generative AI was released into the market, he said.
“Again warnings of massive disruption in professional services, unemployment for graduates, etc, etc. And here we are in late 2025, three years on, and in my view, the profession has yet to profoundly change,” he said.
“Based on that experience, I'm a great optimist, and I believe that just like previous waves of technology, we will adapt as a profession to generative AI.”
Nightingale’s advice to accountants was to experiment with AI tools, and: “Don't be afraid of them.”
“I've been using AI extensively in my own little tax advisory business. It's an incredible tool,” he said.
It was more powerful than those previous technology waves, he said.
“As professionals, it's reaching into our experiences, reaching into our judgment, and our wisdom, and those are the things that we ultimately sell,” he said.
“We are going to need to adapt to that and adapt to that quickly,” he said.
But, he said: “In the foreseeable future, they [AI tools] are not going to replace human to human contact, human to human delivery of services, human judgment, and relationships, and ultimately the thing that we all trade in is trust.”
Accountants should adopt the tools, and learn how to use them, while taking great care with their governance.
Nightingale cited an embarrassing failure by consulting firm Deloitte in Australia which provided a report to government which contained AI-generated errors.
“You need some governance over AI, but you actually need to allow, permit, and encourage the adoption of retail AI tools within your business to discover what the value and where the use cases are,” he said.
Nightingale said AI should feature in all planning and strategy sessions.
Nightingale recommended businesses use an off-the-shelf subscription AI, and not try to build their own systems as AI was moving so fast.
“It should be cancelable because you don't know what's going to happen in six months or 12 months, and almost certainly, if you invest deeply in bespoke tools, you're going to end up with stranded capital,” he said.
Data protection was a must for accountants, and Patel advised only to use AI that guaranteed data would remain secret, and not be used by the AI’s controllers to train their AI.
Patel advised accountants to choose a “business” AI, something like ChatGPT for business, which guaranteed that.
“They sign in blood, ‘We will not take your data and use it’. Even if you pay for the consumer version of those tools, that is not the case,” Patel said.
Patrick O'Doherty, chief data officer at the Inland Revenue Te Tari Taake, viewed AI as “just the next wave of digital innovation”.
“At the fundamental core of our digital ambition is around how do we get our people ready for what's coming next,” he said.
Workers needed to have “digital dexterity”.
The Inland Revenue was rolling out Microsoft 365 Co-pilot to all staff by the middle of next year, and training them to use it.
It was also trialling Snowflake Cortex AI to automate processes. So far, that had been focused primarily on audits, but its use would expand.
There was a glimmer of hope for accountants and tax advisers, who might get more work, if the taxman was able to do more audits by using AI.
One accountant in the audience was worried AI might reduce the critical thinking capacities of juniors, if they didn’t have to struggle with learning the trade of accounting and tax.
There are increasing concerns that AI may make people lazier, and less critical, partly based on a relatively limited study from MIT in the United States.
Patel’s answer was to use AI to train juniors to recreate the tough early learning years he and, many years before, Nightingale had experienced.
The question has also been posed: If AI does the lower-level grunt work, why do older practitioners need to hire young people at all?
Nightingale wasn’t convinced.
“You can read all the doomsday articles about no graduate roles and no junior roles and everything, but you know, in the last 18 months that there's mixed views emerging on that. The Wharton School of Business did a survey just recently which said 49% of chief people officers were looking at hiring more graduates to deal with AI, not less,” he said.
One firm prediction he had, however, was that the “old hourly rate model” was finally going to die.
“Firms are going to have to think really hard about how they change their economic model. How much time a human spends on your work is not going to be relevant.”